Recipe determination and scheduling of gasoline blending operations

Gasoline is a major contributor to the profit of a refinery. Scheduling gasoline-blending operations is a critical and complex routine task involving tank allocation, component mixing, blending, product storage, and order delivery. Optimized schedules can maximize profit by avoiding ship demurrage, improving order delivery, minimizing quality give-aways, avoiding costly transitions and slop generation, and reducing inventory costs. However, the blending recipe and scheduling decisions make this problem a nonconvex mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP). In this article, we develop a slot-based MILP formulation for an integrated treatment of recipe, specifications, blending, and storage and incorporate many real-life features such as multipurpose product tanks, parallel nonidentical blenders, minimum run lengths, changeovers, piecewise constant profiles for blend component qualities and feed rates, etc. To ensure constant blending rates during a run, we develop a novel and efficient procedure that solves successive MILPs instead of a nonconvex MINLP. We use 14 examples with varying sizes and features to illustrate the superiority and effectiveness of our formulation and solution approach. The results show that our solution approach is superior to commercial solvers (BARON and DICOPT). © 2009 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 2010